Lunar's Last Stand

Lunar's Last Stand:
Racing Against the Clock for Survival

As we've covered before, Lunar tried backing out of the deal of buying Instabank for 1,4 billion NOK after getting a backlash from the Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway. Instabank shareholders then accused Lunar of buyer's remorse and not fulfilling their end of the agreement. This week, the court decided that they sided with Instabank, mandating Lunar to cough up over 630 million NOK for 1,77 NOK per share, tax disadvantages faced by some shareholders, and legal fees.

Despite an immediate appeal and a capital injection of around 300 million NOK from existing shareholders for growth, Lunar faced further setbacks. The Danish Financial Supervisory Authority demanded that Lunar accounts for the potential loss, pushing Lunar into a dire financial position that failed to meet new, stricter capital requirements. Lunar now faces a deadline to propose a solution to satisfy these requirements by Friday, with a shortfall of approximately 116 million NOK.

If you thought banking was boring, think again. Lunar's story has all the trappings of a blockbuster – ambition, drama, and a ticking clock. As time passes, Lunar is in an intense and suspenseful situation, echoing classic underdog stories. The question remains: Can Lunar navigate this financial storm and unveil a master plan in time?

Adobe XD is dead – What can we learn from Figma's growth?

In 2022, Adobe announced that they would acquire Figma for $20 Billion - the tool many designers and developers use to sketch their solutions. Late 2023 it was announced that the sale didn't go through because of antitrust regulators, and Figma received a $1 Billion break up fee (Giving them a $12 billion ARR 😂)

1 Month after the deal fell through, Adobe has now announced that they are killing off Adobe XD, and InVision is shutting down their design collaboration services. This basically leaves the only competitor to Figma being Sketch, (and potentially Framer).

But what is interesting is how Sketch in 2017 had almost 70% of the UX-tool market. I've thought about how Figma conquered the market in such a short time. Here are seven reasons why, and what we can learn from it:

1. Plattform agnostic: Sketch was only available for Mac and took years to be shareable on the web. Meanwhile, Figma worked in the browser, making projects instantly shareable. Design can't be created in a vacuum, and excluding all Windows users made it harder for Sketch to grow.

2. Customer journey: Figma recognized the problem of files (Design_final_final_v2.sketch anyone?) and launched a project format similar to Google Docs. Look at the whole customer journey when creating products. Your solution might be hidden in something as trivial as naming.

3. Multiplayer: By pioneering multiple cursors, Figma made it possible to collaborate on the same document simultaneously. This supercharged their progress since new users constantly used Figma. A social or viral aspect built into your product can skyrocket your growth!

4. Community: You get 100 million hits if you search for "Sketch assets" on Google. Figma noticed the popularity of providing assets to designers and created a community built into their app to share assets. This produced a powerful loop where everything was available in the app.

5. Plugins: Sketch had a mature plugin system, but you had to download files (often from GitHub) and install them. Figma successfully lowered the installation threshold by clicking a link in the community. Plugins enabled other people's creativity while tying them to Figma.

6. One tool to rule them all: As a designer using Sketch, you used multiple tools to share assets with developers, share files with other designers, and create prototypes. Figma merged collaboration, project sync, comments, developer documentation, and prototyping into the same tool. This made it easier for larger companies to justify the cost of one tool instead of multiple tools.

7. Migration: Migration from another service is always a pain. Figma saw this and built a feature to import Sketch files into their environment. The importer kept the layers intact and brought over symbols as components, making migration seamless.

Over on X, Clark Valberg from Invision reflects on why Invision went bust in this market. The short story was that designers moving quickly from Sketch to Figma disrupted them, which dismantled their value chain.

Credit card debt Leaderboard

It's been a long newsletter this week. Here are two short and fun posts to end things. Soren Iverson daily creates unhinged product design concepts. Here is one of his ideas for credit cards:

Button thief

Anatoly Zenkov has made the most fun and useless browser plugin I've seen in a while: It steals buttons from all the websites you visit and adds them to a collection of your stolen buttons. 😆

Download "Button Stealer" here.